Brexit: UK-EU Movement of People (EUC Report)

Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood Excerpts

Monday 17th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the committee members, their staff and advisers who contributed to this excellent report, and I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, on her lucid opening of the debate. I confess to seeing this report as an opportunity seized rather than, unlike my noble friend Lord Green, as an opportunity lost.

A fortnight ago, I spoke in the debate on the committee report on the acquired rights of EU citizens introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy. The report we are dealing with today is, to a degree, related. Both reports, for example, helpfully summarise the effect of the 2004 citizens directive, spelling out the directly enforceable rights conferred on all EU citizens, as subsequently developed by the ECJ and extended to all EEA nationals. However, whereas the earlier debate concerned the sufficiency of the offer that we are now making to the other 27 states about the rights already acquired by EU citizens, today’s report concerns rather the question of how far post Brexit we should restrict the rights of EU citizens to come here. In short, it deals with proposed immigration control, not with those who already have the right to be here.

In the earlier debate I concentrated on the question of the enforcement of whatever substantive rights that ultimately come to be recognised in the withdrawal agreement, my essential point being that we should put aside our absurd red-line objection to the ECJ—perhaps in future with a co-opted British judge—having jurisdiction to resolve any disputes that may subsequently arise on the proper construction and application of the withdrawal agreement. “Enforcement” is the heading of a section of the present report, too, but here in a quite different context. Here it relates to the inevitable problems that will arise—creating, of course, reciprocal problems for our own citizens in other EU states—if we start enforcing strict immigration controls over EU citizens and, for that matter, over EEA nationals too, that are similar to those that we impose on third-country nationals. There will be problems for the Home Office, the Border Force, employers, possibly for landlords and so on. The stricter the controls, the more expensive and problematic enforcement becomes.

Even more significant than the cost and difficulty of enforcement is the price we shall have to pay for any such extensive restrictions on the free movement of workers in terms of our being allowed access to the single market, a topic upon which many of your Lordships have already spoken. I found the committee’s conclusions on this point, in paragraphs 77 to 80, of critical importance. Basically, we should be aiming to reach agreement for controls—hopefully, well short of those imposed on third-country nationals—which we hope will be compatible in the eyes of the other 27 with an acceptable free trade agreement. However, how achievable this will be and when relative to the two-year negotiating period remain to be seen.

Once again, as with the question of the future of ECJ jurisdiction, I implore the Government to set aside their red-line approach to free movement, at least to the extent of recognising the merits, certainly in the short to medium term, of exiting the single market—or, rather, the EU—by way of the EEA, a possibility that I dealt with at some length in the Brexit debate on the Queen’s Speech, when I made certain brief points in favour of taking EEA membership at least for a transition period.

For my part, I regard the total abolition of the rights of free movement of EU citizens, just as the total rejection of any future role for the ECJ, as an absurdly doctrinaire objective. Both seem to me to be misconceived as red-line issues and each is profoundly damaging to the prospects of successful Brexit negotiations. Just as the ECJ could play a useful role in resolving future supranational disputes, so too we shall continue to need a great many EU citizens who will wish to come here in the future. We should be trying to attract and encourage them rather than impose restrictions.

Obviously, the continued inclusion of students in the immigration statistics remains a puzzling and profoundly damaging mistake. The noble Lord, Lord Cormack, focused on the issue, and I suspect that the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, may do so as well. But in addition to students, at any rate until some future date when we have trained up and persuaded our own citizens to do these jobs, we need health and care workers, plumbers and builders, workers in the hospitality industry, for crop harvesting and food processing, and so on and so forth.

I recognise and accept the need to place some limited restrictions on the present absolute right to freedom of movement of all EU citizens, not least to reflect the apparent wishes of many—although not all, as the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, has made plain—who voted for Brexit in the referendum. Indeed, the goal of some limited restrictions on free movement now seems to be shared by a number of other EU states and before too long may well come to be accepted within the Union as a whole. By all means let us negotiate towards such a conclusion, but I urge the Government to abandon any absolutist, ideological, confrontational stance on this difficult issue. A high degree of freedom of movement for all EU workers will continue even after Brexit; it will remain an article of faith and a cardinal principle of the Union as a whole, and we shall not achieve a satisfactory future trading deal without recognising and respecting it. It is in that fundamental context that we should now consider this most valuable report.